This interview with Bernard Cribbins first ran in March 2020 and has been republished after his death at age 93
Bernard Cribbins has just purposefully walked into a smart hotel near his home in Surrey. We’re looking for a quiet place to sit down and talk about his new memoir, Bernard Who?, when the vivacious 91-year-old, in the middle of a conversation, misses a step and falls – horribly – flat on his face, arms spread out at his side, and lets out an almighty groan that I fear may be his last.
As I kneel next to him to check his pulse, he suddenly and miraculously rolls over, sits up and immediately begins to joke with the crowd that has gathered. “I’m going to die later,” he tells a concerned employee. Then, as an afterthought, adds, “Can I wrap some ice in a napkin?”
It’s only when we’re finally safe that he takes a moment to look in a nearby mirror, carefully examining the red spot on his forehead, before exclaiming, “It’s great, but I’m still going.”
He has that cropped, happy, infectious smile so familiar to the four generations who have seen him on TV, film and stage in his 70-year career as an actor.
It’s all mapped out in the pages of Bernard Who? Why did he wait so long to write his memoirs? After all, he’s a household name from his West End debut in the Comedy of Errors in 1956, through youthful film appearances in the Carry On films and Casino Royale, followed by memorable roles as the stationmaster whose kind heart hides behind an unofficial manner in The Railway Children, the annoying guest in Fawlty Towers and the narrator of the Wumbles in the 1970s. And then there’s Doctor Who, Coronation Street and most recently Old Jack’s Boat, plus a lifetime achievement Bafta Award in 2009 for his work for children’s TV, including his role in Jackanory – something a taxi driver once told him “made [him] wants to read. And I almost cried.”
The man who is decidedly emotionless about himself is also shamelessly emotional about his job. The memory of what that driver said to him that day makes him better now. “My parents didn’t read to me,” he explains. “My father was a track worker, my mother was in the cotton mills. They were broken when they came in. They fed me and, [told me to] go upstairs.”
However, he is grateful for his working-class upbringing – the thing he attributes to his longevity in both life and work. He can still make an Oldham accent, having spent most of the first two decades of his life in the town of Lancashire, but after a stint of nearly six years in the local repertory theater in the mid-1940s – interrupted by National Service in Palestine – he went south and learned to tone it down. It’s what you had to do then, he says, for what he calls, with overly chic intonation, “the theatre.”